


Martyr

by stardustmelodies



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Human Mage Origin, and all quests except the main story ones that could be said no to were, customizable character, so basically none of the loyalty missions were even brought up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:08:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26183962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustmelodies/pseuds/stardustmelodies
Summary: Leliana thinks back to her time with the Hero of Ferelden, and wonders if it was right of her to mischaracterize her in the songs she wrote following the woman’s ultimate sacrifice.Based on the thought: What if you played though Origins and deliberately avoided nearly every optional interaction, including talking to your companions?
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Martyr

**Author's Note:**

> I had a thought that was basically: what if you played though Origins and deliberately avoided nearly every optional interaction, including talking to your companions? What kind of person would that version of the Hero of Ferelden be from her companions’ point of view?
> 
> Warden for this is a human mage. “Canonical” character death, and some light Inquisition spoilers (but not too many seeing as I’m not actually through the game yet, myself).
> 
> Also, I always found it funny that since most people customize their characters to try to make them look sort of like themselves that would mean that all three possibly unrelated or only loosely related heroes of Thedas would all look kind of similar.

“Forgive me,” Leliana says and takes a step back as she realizes she’s been staring, “You… reminded me of someone I once knew.” At the perplexed look the mage and lesser noble gives her, she shakes her head and looks away. After a brief moment, she elaborates, “Someone I traveled with for a time.”

“The Hero of Ferelden?” replies Trevelyan, who’s eyes widen, “We’re both mages, but I don’t think I’ve ever been likened to her. We were never even at the same Circle together.”

“I don’t know. Perhaps… something about how you wear your hair?”

“My hair?” she reaches up and runs her fingers through short, dark tresses, “Half the girls in Ostwick wear it like this. Short and simple, so it stays out of your eyes.”

“Yes,” Leliana answered absently, awkwardly, and looked off, “If you’ll excuse me.”

It was perhaps not the best way to get acquainted with the newest addition to their ragtag team. Later, when she brought the matter up with Cassandra over dinner, the Seeker seemed equally surprised by the sentiment. “The Hero of Ferelden?” she asked, “Perhaps she shares a passing resemblance to the Champion of Kirkwall, they were cousins, you know. But to the prisoner?” she shook her head. She did not see it. “No, I think not.”

Sighing into her soup, Leliana shook her head. She’d met Hawke, too – briefly, years ago – and the Amell family resemblance had been striking, but that was not what she recognized in this young woman. It was something else. Her eyes? Her jawline? The contemplative way her brow furrowed just before she spoke? Leliana could not be sure.

“You knew her?” Cassandra probed, “I’ve heard your ballads about the year you spent together during the Blight.”

With a rueful laugh, the Nightingale nodded, though the smile that proceeded failed to touch her eyes. “We traveled together, yes, though I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say I _‘knew’_ her. That any of us did, really.”

Perplexed by such an equivocal reply, Cassandra pushed the remainder of her meal away from her — the unappetizing and ashen colored gruel that it was — and leaned back in her chair. She crossed her arms and studied the pensive look on the lay sister across from her. She wondered suddenly what noun the bard might assign their own acquaintanceship, if familiar titles were so hard to come by. Seeing the confusion on the Seeker’s face, Leliana acted quickly to dissuade the tension growing in the narrow confines of their ramshackle accommodations. “I do not mean to seem so harsh,” she said, “Or speak ill of the dead.”

“Your songs always made things sound so… romantic.”

She hummed her reply, “We all have a habit of romanticizing the past, do we not?” she laughed, dryly, “Bards, especially. No, I do not mean to suggest things were uncivil among us. Only that I… embellished some parts of the tale a bit. I felt – after the archdemon attack on Denerim, and so much destruction at Ostagar – what Ferelden needed was a hero.” And maybe, what she wouldn’t admit, even privately, was that she had needed such, as well.

“So you provided them one.”

She hadn’t the nerve to say it aloud. Not even in over the decade’s time since the events had taken place. Instead, as evasion was her bread and butter, she answered, “Not to mention how difficult it is to come up with a decent rhyme for _‘detached’_ that fits the common metre.”

At this, Cassandra barked a brief laugh. But after years spent working together, Leliana sees the way her admission has caused the lines around the Seeker’s eyes and forehead to deepen slightly. Hardly noticeable should one not know her well, but the Spymaster is clever and has been groomed since adolescence to recognize the emotional impact she has on others. She sees the distress the news has caused, and with it knows she had made the right choice all those years ago to take a simple, quiet woman and turn her into a luminary legend post-mortem.

* * *

In truth, the Warden had been a quiet girl. Reserved, meticulous, respectful, but altogether distant. Perhaps it had been her upbringing in the the Lake Calenhad Circle Tower. It could not have been easy, living from such an early age away from her family and with Templars constantly breathing down her back. And maybe it was the fact Leliana had carried a flame for her back then that made this revelation so dispiriting. Of course, half the camp had liked the young mage back in those days. Leliana could recall the way Zevran or Alistair had taken to stealing glances when Amell wasn’t looking. Then again, she’d only noticed because she'd been doing the same. In hindsight, it was unclear if the young woman had truly been as oblivious as she’d appeared at the time, or was simply too shy or unused to the attention as to have properly commented on the gawking.

It was not as if Leliana had purposefully kept her attraction a secret, merely that it was hard enough to talk with her, let alone flirt. Not because Amell was cruel or short tempered like Morrigan, nor brutish or obtuse like Sten. She was simply reticent, above all else, and scarcely made herself available for the idle banter the remainder of the party allowed themselves, be it while traveling in the daylight hours or by the fireside in the evenings. Even when it was just the two of them, awake and on watch during cold nights in camp, where speaking was preferable to silence if for nothing else than the byproduct of hot air it produced to warm one’s hands. Even then, the Warden seemed to prefer the quiet and the stillness of the biting midnight air to sharing any thoughts of her own. This wasn’t to say she was uninviting. On the contrary, Amell always listened politely to Leliana should she be forthcoming with any particular thought or story, but such tendencies to prattle had not been reciprocal, and before long Leliana found herself doing less and less of it, and instead turning for conversation to the other members of the bizarrely outfitted bunch.

Alistair, as it had turned out, also had something of a crush on the newly initiated Warden, and admitted as much freely to Leliana one night, only on the condition that the detail remain _out_ of any tales she had been composing at the time. Leliana had bonding with him some over this. Some part of her always wondered if it was truly Amell the bastard prince had grown attached to, or if it had merely been the loss of all other Grey Wardens in Ferelden that made him cling to whomever might share that tie now. Later, to both their surprise, something seemed to kindle between Alistair and herself, though neither ever fully admitted it to the other. Leliana was uncertain of the reasoning behind her discomfort at the epiphany. Perhaps it was because they each knew it to not be love. Or, even if it could have been, the circumstances made it seem selfish and unkind to act on the feeling. Only being with another because neither could have who they truly wanted – or truly _thought_ they did, in any case – seemed disingenuous and begrimed. Additionally, it was clear to Leliana that Alistair had never taken a lover before, and she would liked to have believed at the time that her days of sex without meaning were behind her.

The Warden, in turn, seemed to spend the most amount of time with the dog, a mabari they’d only rescued several months into their travels after it had come to their attention that there might have been objects of value back at Ostagar. Wynne and Alistair had pleaded with her to return to the battle field, and when they had, they discovered a lone survivor of the kennel master’s war dogs, who bravely fought alongside them as they waded through the remaining darkspawn to give King Cailan a funeral pyre more fitting of the brave, if not somewhat misguided, young ruler. Since then, although Wynne had been the one to offer a name, Amell spent most of her evenings off to the far side of camp with the hound, who made no secret of its affections towards her in return. Perhaps because pets had not been allowed in the Circle Tower. Or maybe she simply preferred quiet companionship. This might also have explained why she spent a good deal of time with Sten, who also rarely spoke if not spoken to.

Once, out of curiosity, Leliana had asked Wynne if Amell had always been this way. Wynne, commendably, commented not on Leliana’s prying question or flaring blush, but only said that while as an apprentice she’d never been directly under her tutelage, she did recall Amell as always having been a quiet girl. “And that business with Jowan after her Harrowing didn’t helped matters, much.” Though, seemingly feeling guilty for saying even that much about the girl’s past without her consent, Wynne had refused to elaborate on the topic further. Even following the events at Redcliffe Castle, Leliana had only the pieces she’d overheard in the dungeon between the two once-friends to draw on in an attempt to form a coherent story about her aloof ally’s history with the unfortunate blood mage, or how it may have truly impacted the young woman’s already guarded disposition.

* * *

“She was a _fool,”_ Morrigan said one day as they sat in the modest gazebo in the Skyhold gardens, “I told her as much at the time.” _How dare the Spymaster approach her like this_ , said the cold glare she shot across the quiet morning scene, _under the pretense of old friendship, only to drudge up old wounds and rake her daggers through them._

“You never did say goodbye,” Leliana said, “We did not know why you left.” She could only recall seeing a bright flash of light, followed by looking out her guest room window in time to see a lean and slightly smallish wolf — too large to be a mabari but too deep into civilization to have been a true creature of the forest — make off into the night. When morning arrived and Morrigan did not join them in the main hall, Leliana had made her own conclusions. It was only now, so many years later, that she determined them to have been accurate.

 _“Good riddance,”_ Alistair had said at the time, but she couldn’t help but notice the way his eyes had lingered on the stairwell, as if the slender and familiar frame might have emerged from the shadows at any moment.

“Twas not compassion that guided her; merely cowardice.” Morrigan went on, presently, “I see that now. Even her refusal to kill that damned Crow assassin. She did not stay her hand out of some sense of _morality_ or _nobility._ Nor some baseless desire to see the man turn a new leaf.” The words poured from her tongue as thick and as venomous as the day she’d first thought them. “She simply lacked the will to act. To make any choice that might somehow impact the greater world around her. She was a pawn all her life – first to the Circle, then to the Grey Wardens. It was all she knew how to be.”

 _Perhaps, in this sense, she and Alistair truly would have been perfect together,_ Morrigan thought, having too noticed the way the young man had eyed his underling turned leader, _Two dullards with greatness cast upon them, and neither with the mettle to know how to use it._

“You claim that she was selfish?” Leliana asked, astonished, “Even after all she did? The sacrifice she made?”

“One which she did not have to make at all,” Morrigan all but roared, “I’d offered her a way out. I offered all of the Grey Wardens a way out! A ritual that would have meant none had to die killing the creature that day. And yet she _still_ refused me.” The witch gave a rueful huff and looked away, “I should have asked for _your_ aid in convincing Alistair to lay with me.”

“Lay with you?” Leliana said with a frightfully shocked verve that betrayed her surprise, “That was the ritual?”

“Oh, do not act so prudish with _me_ , ‘Nightingale.’” On Morrigan’s lips the moniker was an insult, not a title. “I am well aware of the various _beds_ your previous profession led you to. Time spent in the Orlesian courts has given me ample time to acquaint myself with not only the history of the _Arcane_ in the region.”

Leliana, long since having abandoned any feeling of shame or embarrassment over such details of her youth, only gave a light chuckle at the inelegant needling. “I’m flattered,” she said, “that my exploits proved worthy of your valuable time.”

To her credit, Morrigan only hummed in reply, and they each fell silent, the embers of a once shallow rivalry long since having burnt out. It was more out of habit that the barb had found its way through her teeth. She had cooled some, in recent years. Practicality had demanded it. Yet, in her mind, the memory played out, still fresh and hot as the day it had happened.

 _“Surely tis not the prospect of blood magic you find troubling,”_ she’d argued, having been entirely blindsided by the Warden’s staunch refusal to assist her in the dark ritual, “Grey Wardens themselves have been known to use such means against the Blight!”

But still, Amell had refused, and Morrigan had been left with no rebuttal. She’d scarcely known a soul other than herself who lacked any worldly attachments whom she could dangle as bait or guilt. And so, hurting for reasons she could not fully express, she’d taken the form of a wolf and fled the castle, pleased only that none of Guerrin’s men were foolish enough to follow, even if she would not have minded the opportunity to work off some of her frustrations on the foot soldiers.

In the present day, she shakes her head as they watch the Inquisitor walk through the yard, on her way to speak with Commander Cullen, no doubt. “A fool and a coward,” Morrigan reiterates, softly, “Let us hope this one is more willing to make difficult choices.”

It was a changing world, and there were few who held within them the power to shape this change; they could not afford indecision from those who did.

Leliana stayed silent until Trevelyan was out of sight.

“You do not think they look at all alike?” she then asked, “Something in her eyes? Or the shape of her face, perhaps?”

Morrigan muses on this for a moment. “Perhaps her hair,” she concedes.

Leliana sighed in frustration.

* * *

She did not like Cullen much. She liked him even less upon hearing from one of her runners that he and the Inquisitor seemed to have taken up a somewhat more-than-friendly relationship with one another.

“For an ex-Templar,” she goaded one time in the war room before the others had arrived, “You certain seem to have an eye for young and beautiful mages.”

The commander stuttered, blushed, and offered a meager reply before purposefully busying himself with the tiny statuettes on the tactical map until Trevelyan the the remainder of the advisors had arrived and the formal counsel meeting began.

Leliana recalled the scene he had made at Lake Calenhad over ten years prior, insistent in the belief that the canaille gang of adventurers, headed by his own former charge, were illusions cast by the demons and blood mages who’d held him prisoner. At the time, Leliana had bared him little sympathy, her impulses towards compassion overruled by the horrification she felt following the young Templar’s urgings to exterminate the entire tower’s residents out of fear of Uldred’s forces. She still disliked him deeply, now, never quite forgiving him for this transgression. She, too, had been the victim of undue torture, after all, but had never let it cloud her judgement or morality so. Ultimately, she’d come to the conclusion he was simply a weak man, and held this belief firmly until Cassandra revealed to her his efforts to wean himself off the lyrium all Templars were made addicts of. Only then did Leliana give him a begrudging, if limited, amount of respect.

Perhaps people could change in some many years time. Maker only knew she certainly had.

* * *

She greeted Alistair warmly the day he arrived at Skyhold, surprised to learn he was the Grey Warden friend Hawke had spoken of. She allowed for his light teasing about her clothing choice, as well as the hood she now wore up at almost all times — mentioning something about how, should his own hairline start to recede or grey, he’d have to convince the higher ranking members of the order to allow for the fashion, citing the famed helmets as dreadfully hot and terribly unbalanced at even the best of times — and were he surprised by her somewhat muted and colder demeanor, he chose not to comment. They’d remained in touch all these years, exchanging letters, crossing paths from time to time, so perhaps it was not so unexpected a change. If anyone knew her well, it was he.

“I’d asked her to let me take the final blow, you know?” he says, after a quiet moment, almost as if he’d plucked the thought from Leliana’s head all on his own. Truly, the man was brighter than any gave him credit. “She refused, told me I was a good man and that I’d do good things for the world, even if I weren’t king, then said she was sorry and…” He shakes his head, eyes distant. “I don’t think she’d ever even picked up a blade before, come to think of it. But she dropped her staff, grabbed the closest steel and just _charged_ the thing.” The laugh he produced lacked it’s usual charm as he stared out the rookery door to the battlements. “The look on her face…”

“I recall.”

“It’s made for excellent stories, though, so I’ve heard.” She feels his elbow lightly bump hers.

“Ah,” she says, with a somewhat strained tone, “You’ve heard the ballads, then?”

“It would have been a larger feat to have _not_ ,” he laughs, “Can’t go anywhere as a Warden these days without some minstrel drumming up those old numbers. Even heard a couple in your tavern here, the other night.”

“Maryden is singing my songs?” Leliana says, eyebrows raising, “That _is_ a surprise. She’d always preferred to write her own. Or so I’d thought.”

“Some stories are hard to compete with, even if they are a bit _embellished_.”

She smiles and kisses the man on the cheek. Her lips linger, briefly, as the ghost of what might have been passes between them.

“All the best ones do,” she tells him.

 _It must have been a lonely life, surely_ , Leliana thinks, and the thought makes her increasingly sad. For she had been a good woman, if not the archetypal hero everyone expected her to be. Perhaps it had been wrong of Leliana to mischaracterize her so. She wonders, briefly, if it might not have caused some damage in the long run, to continue to allow such a limited view of what legends were to look and act like. Maybe it had just been her own sprightly preferences and enjoyment of the spotlight that had shaded her desires to immortalize the mage she’d known as some larger than life figure, whose words flowed with a confidence and power deserving of such a lofty title. She realized that, of all the decisions she’d made in her life, a great many of which had impacted lives in ways far more devastating and direct than the lyrics of some song, that this might've been the decision she struggled with the most, in hindsight. _How odd._

They stood in silence, the two old friends, for awhile as each watched the day grow old around them. And as the golden light of sunset painted everything in Skyhold a deep bronze, Alistair shifted and asked, almost carelessly, “The Inquisitor, I met her earlier — Do you think they look alike? A little? She and the Hero of Ferelden, I mean. Something about the eyes, maybe?”

 _I knew it!_ Leliana thought with a self-satisfied grin, laughing at the puzzled look on Alistair’s face when she cried out.

**Author's Note:**

> If I could have written this whole story as one long, unending sentence, I probably would have.


End file.
